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Comprehension of relatively novel technical material was examined in four groups of undergraduates (N=81) under "text only", "multimedia" and two "diagram" conditions of text supplementation. Multimedia supplementation resulted in superior text comprehension, while standard diagrams did not improve comprehension over "text only" condition. Students with low prior knowledge showed significantly higher comprehension when using multimedia illustration than when studying text alone, whereas for students with high prior knowledge multimedia made no significant difference. Surface learners under-performed overall, but showed remarkably higher comprehension with multimedia than with text alone and nearly equalled comprehension of students with deep, achieving or mixed approaches ...

Connectives are devices that signal the relation between adjacent sentences. Recently there has been a surge of research interest in the role played by connectives in on-line processing. The present research tested the hypothesis that connectives will impact on-line processing to the extent that they signal a text event that represents a departure from the continuity of the events stated in the text. In experiment 1, participants generated sentences to follow a stimulus sentence. An additive, causal, or adversative connective (or no connective) was provided to serve as the first word of the participants' sentence. Results showed that sentences generated ...

Connectives are devices that signal the relation between adjacent sentences. Recently there has been a surge of research interest in the role played by connectives in on-line processing. The present research tested the hypothesis that connectives will impact on-line processing to the extent that they signal a text event that represents a departure from the continuity of the events stated in the text. In experiment 1, participants generated sentences to follow a stimulus sentence. An additive, causal, or adversative connective (or no connective) was provided to serve as the first word of the participants' sentence. Results showed that sentences generated ...

The general aim of the present study was to investigate the influence of oral and written discourse media on various types of inferences in text processing. The special aim of this experiment was to investigate the contribution of the processing control factor to the repeatedly observed modality effect in text processing. In order to reduce processing control in reading we included a reading condition with word-for-word presentation on the screen of a microcomputer. In the first experiment an expository text was presented orally, typewritten on two pages and word-for-word on a display screen. There were no similarities in the recall ...

The general aim of the present study was to investigate the influence of oral and written discourse media on various types of inferences in text processing. The special aim of this experiment was to investigate the contribution of the processing control factor to the repeatedly observed modality effect in text processing. In order to reduce processing control in reading we included a reading condition with word-for-word presentation on the screen of a microcomputer. In the first experiment an expository text was presented orally, typewritten on two pages and word-for-word on a display screen. There were no similarities in the recall ...

This study examined factors that were posited to play an important role in the development of proverb comprehension in school-age children and adolescents, namely, the concreteness and the familiarity of the expressions. Normally achieving students enrolled in Grades 5, 8, and 11 (n = 180) were administered a written forced-choice task that contained eight instances of four different types of proverbs: concrete-familiar ("A rolling stone gathers no moss"); concrete-unfamiliar ("A caged bird longs for the clouds"); abstract-familiar ("Two wrongs don't make a right"); and abstract-unfamiliar ("Of idleness comes no goodness"). Performance on the task steadily improved as a function of ...

A proverb explanation task consisting of 24 low-familiarity expressions was administered to 353 individuals ranging in age from 13 through 79 years. Half the proverbs were composed of concrete nouns ('A caged bird longs for the clouds') and half were composed of abstract nouns ('Humility often gains more than pride'). The task was designed to examine how patterns of language growth in adults compare to those observed in adolescents. It also served as a tool for examining the 'metesemantic hypothesis,' the view that complex semantic units, such as proverbs, are learned through active analysis of the words they contain. Performance ...

Reports on 5 experiments with 234 Ss on backward causal inferences, which were signaled by the conjunction "because." These inferences served to justify the causal relation (CSR) expressed by the sentence. The texts were expository. Although the inferences were required for a good understanding of the CSR, they were not made during reading, as was indicated by reading and verification times in Exps 1 and 2 and judgments in Exp 3. However, Exps 4 and 5 showed that these inferences were made during reading if they were relevant to the purpose of reading. ...

Reports on 5 experiments with 234 Ss on backward causal inferences, which were signaled by the conjunction "because." These inferences served to justify the causal relation (CSR) expressed by the sentence. The texts were expository. Although the inferences were required for a good understanding of the CSR, they were not made during reading, as was indicated by reading and verification times in Exps 1 and 2 and judgments in Exp 3. However, Exps 4 and 5 showed that these inferences were made during reading if they were relevant to the purpose of reading. ...

Reports on 5 experiments with 234 Ss on backward causal inferences, which were signaled by the conjunction "because." These inferences served to justify the causal relation (CSR) expressed by the sentence. The texts were expository. Although the inferences were required for a good understanding of the CSR, they were not made during reading, as was indicated by reading and verification times in Exps 1 and 2 and judgments in Exp 3. However, Exps 4 and 5 showed that these inferences were made during reading if they were relevant to the purpose of reading. ...